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What would you do for….

I have a Wish list on Amazon.com. Much of what's on there are books that I either need someday for seminary or want for ministry or personal edification.

Then there's some things that seem highly random. The reason for this? Well, you see, MasterCard is sponsoring a sweepstakes on Amazon.com that if you add stuff to your Amazon wish list from external websites using this nifty "Universal Wish List" tool, you could win $100,000.

I think the reason is that Amazon.com is trying to take over the world before Facebook beats them to it. By getting all of this information, they can slowly get into the midst of all of our lives. However, for 10 $10,000 Mastercard prepaid cards, they can creep into mine a little bit.

I thought, though, they should see whose life they're creeping into. So, my wish list now contains seminary books, theology books, the entire collection of the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and a small arsenal. Even the wish list we use to organize "homeschool needs/wants" includes a shotgun and a Smith&Wesson automatic. (Yes, we have guns in our school. This spring/summer I'm actually going to teach Olivia to shoot. Assuming my life insurance is paid up.)

It's not so much that I really want the stuff, and if I won the sweepstakes, I don't know that I'd buy guns with all of it. Some of it, certainly, but not all of it .

This got me wondering: how far do we go for things we think we want? What are we willing to do get stuff? As the old commercial went, "What would you do for a Klondike Bar?"

I think about things that I do for stuff: I review books for 3 publishers to get free books, I scour the net for free eBooks for my Kindle, I go out into the woods with a gun in hopes of finding a deer (I don't actually believe any are there). It's a lot of effort, and not always a lot of result.

My questions to consider this morning: Where are we putting effort to receive things? What extremes are we going to for stuff we're not even sure we want? And where are we holding back in the attempts to get and do what we do want, what we do feel is necessary and important? Just wondering out loud…or out-blog, I guess.

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